32 1Il l ' \ .aJ.l , r \ u . " :.. .. .&- .- - A '!I ? '" ......... ..... 1 ,fii ""-- .... '*' ..... .. "S- "'" >& " " ^ '-,' ..... " ", \ ^ . "!, :q >><^ : , --. \ J, \ f . . .. 'à "Would you mind doing your thinking somewhere else?" . began to brighten up. Or rather, she became practical, and you saw what was really behind all that English gab. She sat bolt upright in her chair, her eyes flashing from Father to Mother, to see how they were taking it. (Mother wasn't takIng it at all well. Having been brought up in an orphanage herself, she didn't like to have it made an excuse for drama.) Compensation was now her theme-purely for the children's sake, of course. There were several sailors' wIdows living In the city, but they had been impractical, as Irish people gener- ally were. What they had got for the loss of husbands or sons was only a trifle, and even that they had not handled wisely. They weren't accustomed to handling lump sums like English peo- ple. And, of course, bad as wages were and uncertain as were jobs, they did bring in the regular dibs, didn't they? while no one could say what mIght hap- pen to a lump sum unless it was invested wlseir. Y ou had to make your money earn for you, hadn't you? She'd have a lawyer to see that the shipping company treated her faIrly, and after that she should have enough to buy a house in London, which she would run as a su- . perior lodging house, furnished in style and limited to lodgers of the best class, not workingmen, who would only be coming in in the evenings with dIrty clothes and lowering the tone of her house. There her children would have a real education, not the sort of thing that passed for education among the na- tives. The first thing she would do would be to buy a piano, so that they could grow up like real little ladies. There was something about being able to play the piano that raised a girl in a man's opinion, wasn't there? And subtly, almost imperceptibly, as she talked, her tone changed, and she was no longer practical but giddy and gay.. That was when Father's reminis- cences of London became important, because he reassured her about the ex- istence of the parks and the bands and the music halls, and all at once, her red face beaming, she would run her hands over the keys of an imagInary piano and sing, in a cracked voice: " Oh ' h . , won t we ave a merry tIme, Drinking whiskey, beer and wine, On Coronation Day?" By this time, she would be in the hIghest of spirits, cracking jokes and FEßR.IIARY I 4-, I 9 5 9 making the children laugh. But, as though she found it difficult to sustain any mood for long, that, too, would pass, and she would remember her bad neighbors and her many wrongs, and snap at the children to be quiet In those days, I didn't understand it, and I doubt if my parents understood it, either, so we watched it in fascination. Now I suppose that Gertie was thinking all the time that even If the wind was still howl- ing about the house, the old ShIP had weathered worse nights, and she would never return to dear old London Town but end her days among Irish Catholics who didn't even know what the bloke in the Holy Land had said about giving people things. Then she would accuse the children of having no hearts, and when they cried would lift them one by one and spank them unmercifully, until Mother angrily protested, and finally she would shufHe off as she had come, into the storm, trailing the two yelling kids behind her by the hand and mut- terIng to herself. O N the other side of us lived an even stranger character, called Nora Farrell, who was one of the handsomest old women I have ever seen. In the summer and autumn evenings she stood at the gate of her little house, resting her right arm on the broken-down gate- post, and occasionally pushing back the thin white hair from her long, bloodless, toothless face When she went out, she moved almost without raising her feet, and this gave her what seemed a firm and stately demeanor. As she grew older and walking became harder, she would grasp a railing and hang on there for as long as it took her to get back her breath, but she always held her head high, and looked angrily up the road, as though she had paused only to survey the scene. Being from Tipperary, she despised and hated Cork. A few doors down from her lived her husband and daughter, who were almost as odd as herself. Farrell was an old peddler with a hump, and he pos- sessed a bit of the miraculous Knock stone, with which he sometimes cured diseases, while his daughter, a washer- woman, limped because of some disease of the hip, and never went to bed. Once, years before, she had seen someone die like that, and never after it had any use for beds. In twenty-five-odd years Nora F arrel1 had not spoken a word to either of them except when she shufHed past their gate in a wicked mood and snarled a curse at them. Yet there was a queer romance about the Farrells They had been great sup-